The Gulf Coast Blog

Craft • Culture • News

Craft • Culture • News

Eric Howerton

A few years back, after nine months of living in Houston, I started listening to heavy metal music. When I was a teenager in the '90s I was familiar with popular heavy metal bands like White Zombie (psychedelic, campy blues metal), Korn (hip-hop laced,…

Olga Mexina

• Last will
V. S. Let's agree to this: when I die,
you will put a cross on my grave.
Let it be like all other crosses,
but we, my friend, we will know,
it is--just a signature. As on paper
the illiterate leaves his mark, I
want to leave a cross in this…

Janine Joseph

Crystal unicorns watch, curious with silent knowledge.
--from "Independent Weakness," 1999 I've sent out thousands of rejections. When I was in high school, I was an editor of the school's literary journal, Imagery, for two years, rejecting teenage poetry…

Frances Justine Post

[a line from Sherman Alexie's "The Exaggeration of Despair"] • I am a poetry geek. I didn't quite realize the extent of my geekery until this year when I started teaching my first workshop. As I was trying to come up with a syllabus, I tried to think…

Jameelah Lang

People don't like happy stories, and that's the truth. You may have heard, "Happiness writes white on the page," which basically means, "Keep your happy story to your damn self, because we don't want to hear it." This goes for life, too, and if you were…

Edward Porter

About a year ago, someone named Cheryl Strayed friended me on Facebook. We had a mutual friend, my wife, so I accepted. After that--the deluge. Strayed's Wild, her memoir about her partial through-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail that she undertook in…

Ashley Wurzbacher

[Wurzbacher, who is currently teaching first-year fiction at the University of Houston, would like to thank her English 3329 students for permission to reproduce excerpts from their critiques--contrasted here with the rather dimmer pronouncements of anonymous…

David Tomas Martinez

Sometimes there are unexpected pleasures that give surprising depths of delight. And not in a Christmas Eve kind of way--me a robust nine years old, knowing my parents bought me an Atari, so I stayed up all night, tossing and twirling in my racecar bed,…

Zachary Martin

Twenty-six years. That's how long Gulf Coast has been publishing the very best fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. A lot has changed since Donald Barthelme and Philip Lopate founded the journal in 1986: the rise of internet commerce and the e-reader,…

Rachel Hooper

The Houston Fine Art Fair (Photography/Gary Fountain, September 15, 2012) Last year, Houston went from zero art fairs to two, the Houston Fine Art Fair and the Texas Contemporary, and both are back this year with the addition of a satellite project,…